$800 is actually one of the best PC build budgets you can give yourself this year.

Coming short of $900 can bring forth a bit of trouble in fitting a modest GPU and SSD at the same time, but don’t worry, we’ve got you covered as always.

In this guide, we’re going to cover the best $800 gaming PC in 2020 - you’ll be able to crush 1080p and even 1440p with this build, so sit down and strap in.

Let’s get started:

Prebuilt Choice

The $800 price point is somewhat of a mixed bag when it comes to the odd landscape that is Amazon’s ‘Desktop Computer’ category.

So we scoured the bargain bin through the trash and the rubble to get you the best prebuilt your money can buy.

Prebuilt Option

iBUYPOWER Elite N27W 106A

800 Dollar Prebuilt Gaming PC

With this $800 prebuilt, you're getting an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, GTX 1660 6GB GPU, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 240GB SSD and a 1TB mass storage drive, not to mention Windows 10, a mouse and a keyboard. It's a great deal and easily the best prebuilt gaming PC you can buy for 800 dollars.

In the graphics department, the N27W puts a good foot forward, but not its best. Sporting just a GTX 1660, as opposed to our chosen GTX 1660 Ti, you’ll be losing out on about 20% of performance in games.

For its many blunders, though, the N27W includes a pre-installed full copy of Windows 10 Home, an internal Wi-Fi adapter, RGB lighting, a beautiful tempered glass side panel, a mouse, a keyboard, 1-year warranty, and free lifetime tech support. Absolutely outstanding!

Now that AMD’s been flipping Intel the bird in the budget market for quite a bit, it seems Intel’s finally decided it’s time to show ‘em who’s boss.

Not only does it offer that amazing baseline performance, but you know what that ‘K’ designation means:

Overclocking, baby!

Paired alongside a Z390 motherboard, you can expect to hit upwards of 5GHz with the right cooler, and boy did we try to get you one.

One thing you should note with the 9th Gen Intel CPUs if you’re coming back from a long break is that the chips designated with the ‘F’ in the name do not have integrated graphics.

So don’t go into it without a dedicated GPU expecting something to happen, of course.

One of the best parts about this CPU is its overclocking potential. While some people have to pay for game server hosting, the i5-9600KF could handle an intensive task like hosting a Rust server with ease.

We haven’t really included CPU coolers all that much in a lot of our builds since nowadays included stock coolers have been holding their own against their aftermarket counterparts.

However, since the overclockable Intel processors do not include coolers at all we’ve gotta find something, and something good. Hence, the Arctic Freezer Xtreme.

The Arctic Freezer Xtreme Rev.2 is one of the cheapest 120mm CPU coolers you can find on Amazon, 120mm being the size of the fan.

Even with this low price, it delivers outstanding performance with its 1500RPM maximum speed output.

Don’t take that speed as a warning for high sound, though, even with that speed the Freezer only hits around 24dB (decibels).

With a huge heatsink and double-sided heat pipes number 8 total, the cooler does take up quite a bit of space but we assure you that with our case choice it’ll be no issue.

And with the PWM fan, your motherboard can fine-tune your fan speed to fit the temperature of your CPU, it’s honestly pretty amazing.

There are a couple of cheaper options for 120mm coolers, though with maybe a little bit less cooling capacity, but if you really wanna save that dough the Arctic Freezer 33 eSports in either Yellow or Green variants are around $30USD.

MSI Z390-A PRO

ATX Motherboard

Did I hear overclocking? Hell yeah! Coming in clutch is the MSI Z390-A PRO, giving you that beautiful overclock potential you're craving — and the best part? This motherboard is cheaper than its AMD counterpart.

Z390 is all the rage with the new 9th Gen Intel chips flooding the market, and now’s the time to make your move.

Pairing this puppy with our chosen i5-9600KF will give you an amazing head start for gaming especially, and with this board, you’ll be able to push it towards 5GHz or even further as we mentioned before.

Sticking to that theme of overclocking (since that’s what the Z390-A PRO is all about), Intel has recently released a new overclocking utility to compete against AMD’s Ryzen Master.

Intel’s new “one-click” Intel Performance Maximizer utility allows you to overclock your processor from Windows and it handles all the numbers itself, subverting the need to enter the BIOS.

Though don’t go thinking you can get a cheaper board and use the performance maximizer, ‘cause it still requires an overclock-capable board. Oh well.

If you’re a little scared that you may damage your CPU or something like that, Intel offers a $20 warranty upgrade that covers damage caused by overclocking with their tool.

Patriot Viper 4 Blackout

DDR4 3000Mhz RAM

Speed is key, and the Patriot Viper 4 Blackout is here to deliver. This 16GB kit of memory is gonna crush both 1080p and 1440p. In addition, if you're one of those people who has to have 192041 Chrome tabs open at once, this RAM will help with that too.

Even without overclocking, the base clock of 3000MHz makes sure you won’t lag behind anywhere, be it Chrome, Firefox, Brave, or god forbid, Edge.

And at 16GB total memory, trust me, you won’t run out (unless you really need 100 tabs and 12 games open at the same time — in that case, you’ve got 2 extra memory slots on the motherboard for upgrades!)

Performance Benchmarks

Here we’ve got the performance benchmarks so you can see (just about) what you’re buying and make a decision based upon your needs.

Gaming Benchmark

As you can see in the graph, while the two sides do trade blows fairly well and frequently, Intel does come out on top for some of the bigger titles.

This test does not take into account overclocking, but based on the performance numbers for the CPU overclocks (below) the differences should stay pretty consistent.

CPU Speed Benchmark

Starting out with the base clocked performance, it’s just about what we expect in a normal Intel vs AMD matchup; Intel in the lead with single-core, AMD with multi-core.

This is a consistent trend across all price points when comparing the similarities, so get used to it.

Now, the results of the overclocking may change your mind a bit if you were thinking about going AMD.

While AMD technically offers more cores (albeit virtual cores) with their hyperthreading, the raw performance of Intel’s baseline cores just about beats it while overclocked.

This could mean an even better boost for gaming performance.

Read/Write Hard Drive Benchmark

The regular read/write speeds of HDDs are no surprise since they generally perform similarly across the board, but we thought we’d give you a little comparison between our selected drive and the most popular offering from Western Digital.

To say the least, it looks like we’re holding our own:

Moving on to the 4K read/write speeds, if you look closely (we apologize for the weirdness of the graphs) you can see why the WD drive is so popular due to its superior 4K read/write speeds.

Alas, the HDDs still stand no chance against the might of Solid State storage.

Another oddity appears in the 4K read/write of the SATA SSD as opposed to the M.2 contender, maybe that’s why the A400 is so popular these days.

Extra Stuff

After you build your gaming PC, you’re going to need some extra stuff too before you’re ready to game.

Peripherals

Most gamers opt to buy a good gaming monitor, a gaming keyboard/mouse, a gaming headset, and even a microphone.

We know you’re on a budget, so we made a list of our top peripheral picks in each category.